Porous Borders: Multiracial Migrations and the Law in the U.S.–Mexico Borderlands by Julian Lim (review)

The U.S.–Mexico border is often portrayed as a space of Anglo and Mexican interactions, yet the history of the region is much more complex. These intricacies are captured in Porous Borders, in which historian Julian Lim focuses on immigration and legal history to uncover a rich narrative about the multiracial reality of the borderlands. Through this multicultural lens, the author reveals the intersections and interactions between Native Americans, African Americans, Chinese, and Mexicans in shaping border policy, citizenship, and ideas of race and belonging in the city of El Paso, Texas. While Lim is not the first to explore the histories of these groups along the border, she is the first to explore these groups in tandem. In doing so, the author sheds light on the multiracial history of El Paso and the borderlands, how these groups forged identity vis-à-vis one another, and finally, how these groups’ interactions played a role in shaping citizenship and border policies in the first decades of the twentieth century.

Lim’s study begins in the 1880s with the arrival of the railroad in El Paso. In the first chapter, she illuminates the transformation of El Paso and the pull factors that lured newcomers. While the railroad and industries that were established in the region opened the door for new populations, they severely restricted movement for Native Americans as a new geopolitical reality closed the border for them. Chapter 2 delves into how El Paso became a “gateway to freedom” (59) due to its geographic location. For Chinese immigrants, African Americans, and ethnic Mexicans settling in El Paso, the city meant opportunity—new beginnings as well as social, economic, and political freedoms that were not attainable in the U.S. South, West, or in Mexico. As new migrants arrived in the area, their interactions through urban space, work, and marriage blurred the lines of race and identity, making the border porous. This visible multicultural moment in El Paso was short-lived as many factors contributed to the erasure of the border’s multiracial realities.

The Mexican Revolution and the country’s subsequent idealization of mestizaje (the blending of Spanish, African, and indigenous heritage) as well as the United States’ emerging anti-immigrant and racial purity ideologies contributed to the hardening of the border. Chapter 3 discusses the policing of the Chinese community as the Chinese Exclusion Act was enforced. Chapter 4 examines the role of the Mexican Revolution (the Punitive Expedition in particular), and its role in reshaping ideas about race, citizenship and belonging for Chinese, African Americans, Apache Indians, and ethnic Mexicans, as the conflict brought an opportunity for these groups to redefine their relationship to the United States. The final chapter explores how changing ideas about immigration law, race, and national identity in both Mexico and the U.S. took exclusionary forms on the border beginning in the 1920s. As these restrictions regulated the mobility of these groups and figuratively erased the multicultural population of the borderlands, the “porous” nature of the region came to an end.

Porous Borders makes a number of important contributions. Lim’s exploration of El Paso at the turn of the twentieth century through a multicultural lens enriches our understandings of the U.S.–Mexico borderlands and breaks our binary notions of the region. Secondly, her extraordinary efforts to recover these stories from a variety of archives in the United States and Mexico should serve as an example to scholars. Not only did Lim do incredible detective work in excavating these stories from documents, but she also examined the erasure of the multiracial past from the silences of the archives. Despite limited sources, her ability to capture numerous specific examples of multiracial interactions and moments in which various groups challenged the status quo is astounding. Lastly, Lim’s transnational approach sheds light on the connections between U.S. and Mexican...